Esther Walters (CSSD) - 2025-26 Students
252369@cssd.ac.uk

Staging Class in Crisis: Performing Social Relations in Neoliberal Britain

This project explores how contemporary British theatre addresses social class as a site of epistemological crisis under neoliberal capitalism. Focusing on works created since 2016, the research examines contradictions surrounding class identity, meritocracy, and economic inequality, within the formative contexts of deindustrialisation, regionalism, and postcoloniality. By combining socio-economic analysis with theatre studies, the study analyses how theatre represents and reproduces class on stage and in its institutions. The thesis will examine the British theatre’s role in both reinforcing and critiquing reductive accounts of social relations and chart the recent history of theatre’s engagement with class in Britain.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Louise Owen